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Monday, March 25, 2013

Medical television hits a new low

Tipped off by a reader, I watched
“Married to Medicine,” a reality program about doctors' wives and
female doctors in Atlanta, which premiered on the cable network Bravo
last night.

What a colossal embarrassment to the
medical profession, women, black people, television and humanity.

In the beginning, some “highlights”
were shown, which featured a pushing match between two of the
characters. I should have stopped right there, but regrettably, I
kept watching.

I hope the cast members were paid well
because they could not have looked worse had they been on Jerry
Springer.

What could they have been thinking?

They were portrayed as shallow,
materialistic caricatures. And their husbands, the doctors, looked
like fools. Two of them were emergency medicine physicians whose
practices probably won't suffer. But the orthopedic surgeon—who
would go to him after hearing his wife say surgeons bring home the
cash?

After about five minutes, I couldn't
take it any longer.

The reviews of the show have been
mixed. But the New
York Times, an organization that should know better actually had
a favorable slant. Its reviewer said, A confederation of mostly
black women, some of them doctors’ wives and some of them doctors,
enacts scenes of petty jealousy and scorched-earth class warfare that
reinforce every pernicious cliché about female treachery and the
shallowness of buppie culture and that are also, as it happens,
reliably entertaining.

Entertaining if you are a moron.

Black women of Howard University
Medical School, who petitioned the network to cancel the show before
it ever aired, have different views.

Comments on the petition's website
at Change.org were decidedly negative. Here are some excerpts:

Another show depicting black women
as shallow, angry, weave wearing, sassy women that can't get along
with each other. The bigger issue here is that they are representing
a serious community of professionals that have to fight really hard
to be taken serious by their white peers.

As a young black woman in the
medical field, I was excited about the show, foolishly thinking there
would be some sort of mention of, well...medicine. Instead I was
incredibly disappointed, disheartened & embarrassed for what I
saw. It was a mockery of medicine, and a modern day minstrel show.

This show is not reality! I have
many friends that are African American female physicians and I am
also married to a surgeon and we are both African American. This is
NOT how we live and this is NOT our reality! This is a very negative
image and against ALL that we stand for.

7 comments:

It seems the goal of medical television is to see how long you can stay on the air with the crappiest material, or to see just how low you can sink the current low standard. I should probably tune in before I judge, but thankfully you have spared me that pain.

I too eschew reality-TV (OK--I do confess to watching Dancing With the Stars when Hines Ward was a contestant) This show, (Married to Medicine) sounds as though it perpetuates multiple negative stereotypes including that women marry doctors, more often than they become doctors themselves. Granted, this was once true, but a better, more relevant, motivational reality show might focus on statistics that indicate 48% of grads from US medical schools (in 2011) were female! What a change from the 1960-70 era...And young women, from all ethnic groups, need to see, and know that these role-models exist. Instead of building up, reality TV seems to perpetuate the "dumbing-down" of our society.